I Voted Early stickers greeted those who voted at Purdue's Stewart Center during the primary.

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“The students are part of your community. They aren’t just visitors or guests. They are residents of Greater Lafayette. And we need them to become promoters of the region, too.”

OK, so that’s not exactly case law when it comes to who can and who can’t register to vote around here. But it is a product of this community’s considerable time, sweat and self-flagellation in search of answers to this: How can Greater Lafayette be a better, more inviting college town — the kind of place Purdue University students and other young talent would be willing to brag on and stick around?

So it’s difficult to believe a bill that would relegate thousands of out-of-state students to the political sidelines during their years on campus is being taken seriously at the Statehouse.

But House Bill 1311, which received a House Elections and Apportionment Committee hearing on Wednesday, apparently is — much to the stunned amazement of students who know they would be electorally stiff-armed if this thing goes through.

HB 1311, introduced by Rep. Peggy Mayfield, a Martinsville Republican, proposes that the state deny residency for voting to anyone who moves to a precinct for “educational purposes if the person pays a nonresident tuition rate.”

At Purdue, that would apply to 11,080 U.S. nonresident students — or about 28 percent of the total enrollment in West Lafayette this school year, according to the Purdue Data Digest.

“We’re having people who are not necessarily residents voting in our elections,” Mayfield told The Indianapolis Star. Those in favor of the bill said they were looking to keep people from voting in two places — already a Class D felony in Indiana for anyone caught voting twice.

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The bill poses all sorts of problems, not including any assumptions that someone’s polling numbers must say they aren’t popular among the student set or that someone’s simply a fan of tamping down turnout — particularly in precincts that tend to be varying shades of Obama blue.

Wednesday’s hearing brought out a cast of characters of recent Purdue vintage, from Joe Rust, current Purdue Student Government president, to Eddie VanBogaert, a recent out-of-state Purdue graduate, business owner and West Lafayette City Council member. They brought up the perfectly necessary tone of the insulted. And who can blame them?

State Rep. Sheila Klinker, a Lafayette Democrat, lent a page practically ripped from the Community of Choice discussions around town: “I think it sends a negative message to the young people who want to live in our area and who want to stay in our area — many of whom go to graduate school, get married in our area, have children that go to our schools. So we really don’t want to see this bill go any further.”

But let’s say we didn’t really give a flip whether students from other states came, stayed, went, whatever. The question at the Statehouse should be: Is this a problem in college communities?

Not really. At least not here in Purdue’s backyard, says Tippecanoe County Clerk Christa Coffey.

“No, I don’t remember ever having to challenge on the registration status for Purdue students — and I certainly don’t want to encourage that,” Coffey said. “And yes, we do encourage them to register and be involved in this community.”

It’s not as if the county’s election board is beating back a crush of student voters looking to tip the scales. Usually, the opposite is true, taking a monumental effort to coax students buried in studies and smartphones to vote once, let alone twice.

Recent examples: 1. Voter registration for the 2012 elections was down 82 percent in the five precincts most heavily populated with Purdue students. 2. Look at VanBogaert’s 41-19 margin of victory in 2011 in a West Lafayette City Council district thick with students; those 60 votes compare to 1,352 and 1,472 in the other two contested district seats that year.

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Still, never mind that when it comes to voting for Statehouse positions, there’s not much difference between an undergrad from Peoria, Ill., and one from Rising Sun, Ind., once they hit Purdue’s West Lafayette campus. They’re both a long way from home — roughly 160 miles each. But in both cases, those students have been traditionally encouraged to register to vote in their campus communities. That goes for presidential years, city council years and anything in between. It’s been a good setup.

Indiana law requires that a registered voter be at least 18 and a resident of a precinct for 30 days before an election. According to the Indiana Voter Registration Guidebook, state law is case by case when it comes to students. They are allowed only one registration, of course. But according to the guidebook, if they have no plans to return to “the address that they traveled from to attend school ... their residence will be in the community where they are attending school.”

Changing that arrangement would mean the state also would have to reconcile how students are counted when it comes to the U.S. Census — the thing that sets population counts for political districts.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau: College students living away from home are supposed to be counted “at the on-campus or off-campus residence where they live and sleep most of the time.” Like it or not, those Purdue student headcounts on April 1, 2010, belong to Tippecanoe County for the next decade.

And we might as well let the U.S. Supreme Court weigh in. In 1979, the court ruled in Symm v. United States that it was unconstitutional for a Waller County, Texas, election official to use a questionnaire to test residency for Prairie View A&M students who wanted to register to vote. The court ruled that the questions, posed to people the election official didn’t know personally or to those who didn’t own property in the county, were a violation of the 26th Amendment.

Beyond all those technicalities, think about the message this bill sends. If we’re about attracting and keeping the best to our universities — and then to our university towns — is Indiana really serious about telling students they don’t have the right to vote as long as they’re here?